AR; The Future of Newspapers

To find out about the future, let’s look into the past.

Conboy and Steel’s article is a sobering reminder for internet revolutionaries and pessimists alike – I found the piece both interesting and well-written. Referencing Carey’s “ritual model of communication” (as opposed to the more widely used transmission model), the authors put the current developments in media into historical perspective, claiming that these developments are rather reconfigurations of traditional articulations of readership than redefinitions of the role and function of the news media as such.

The Headlines – Just what happened to them?!

Election day looms closer and closer, and it might have seen that I have all but given up on following the social news sites’ headlines every morning. This is not so; but I have been caught up with some other academic duties that left me no time to tinker with actually posting them.

To be precise, a proposal of mine has been accepted for the Experience 2008 conference in November – I have been working on this paper for some time. And in addition, I have been trying to follow the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen – plenty of stuff to write about.

Apologies over.

The Headlines – 9th Oct

…and so we’re after the second presidential debate (here is a video and transcript, courtesy of the New York Times); and from the social news sites we can learn that McCain refused to shake Obama’s hand and referred to him as “that one;” and of course that Obama “won it.” (I’m thinking of a spiral of silence.)

The “this is my wife, shake rather her hand than mine”-bit did seem a bit odd, mind you.

Twits, communities and the question of the source

Twitter is a really interesting little service, one which somewhat inexplicably captured my attention and hasn’t let go of it for more than a year. (This is my account but leave your expectations in the lobby.)

One particular reason I’m interested in it is that Twitter, and similar micro-blogging services such as Jaiku seem to be a place where exposure to “unplanned and unwanted experience”,  so important to Sunstein, abounds. Often, people follow the updates of several thousand fellow Twitterers, or just check out the public timeline or Twittervision, to take a(n admittedly very limited and brief) glimpse of “what’s going on all over the world.” Given the brevity of messages and the overall format, casually reading Twitter is like catching a few words from thousands of conversations while wandering about in a busy and packed street. And if something interesting catches your ear, you immediately can investigate it further, reply to the sender of the message, or click on the link they provided.

The Headlines – 7th Oct.

As Election Day looms, the Democrats are predictably trying to maximize the circumstancial advantage of the economic crisis; what I mean by “predictably” is the less-than-surprising fact that McCain’s involvement in the “Keating five” scandal of 1989 has been reheated, put into parallel with the current situation, and used as a campaign topic.

(Some network trouble has been disrupting the orderly headline-sampling; apologies for the missing entries. At the moment I’m also wrestling with studies of methodology.)

The Headlines – 1st Oct. 2008

In a way it’s reassuring that the 2nd most popular item yesterday on Propeller was a blogpost about beautiful (indeed they are) autumn pictures from Switzerland. Apart from that, business is as usual on the social news sites; headlines after the jump.